One woman, three children, a husband & an unreasonably angry cat. **Now with added puppy!**

Over at JustB Australia, I’ve been getting a few things off my chest, including what’s in my vegetable ‘crisper’ (oh, the humanity!) and whether or not I should buy a Thermomix or just love the kitchen appliances I’m with.

Oh, and I also whipped up a beginner’s guide to ‘Twitterquette‘ (Twitter Etiquette).

Things have changed. And not just in a ‘Darrin-Stephens-in-Bewitched’ kind of way. Not even in a ‘Mike-Brady-gets-a-perm’ kind of way, either.

The way in which things have changed… well, this is not the forum to discuss it. However, please know that I’ve decided to continue blogging, albeit in my usual half-arsed fashion, over at ‘The NDM‘. Expect more (or less) of the same over there… but different.

The things I’ve had enough of are numerous and complicated but, for some reason, instead of dealing with the real problems in my life, I’ve decided to focus on mouse mats and jeggings (leggings that look like jeans). Let’s just say my mind works in mysterious ways.

But listen… In these heady days of track-pads, tell me: who actually uses mouse mats? And shouldn’t the plural of mouse mat actually be mice mats? Those personalised ones with pictures of pets are the worst. If someone gives you one, how long do you have to keep it until you can throw it away? Do you have to wait until the pet dies so that the personalised mouse mat can be buried with the pet??

Ooh, they make me angry, those mouse-mice-mats.

As for jeggings, I actually spent about an hour in the middle of the night thinking about them and how much I’d had enough of them. Wear skinny jeans, by all means, or leggings. But leggings made to look like skinny jeans? Puh-lease. It’s like wearing an apron with plastic breasts attached, but less classy.

I thought of other legging variations that I could hate with an equal passion and came up with this list:

eggings: yolk-coloured leggings

dreggings: leggings that are stretched to buggery and quite frankly have seen better days but are the last clean thing in the drawer to wear.

preggings: leggings worn by themselves that make you look pregnant when you’re not.

pleggings: pleated leggings. No, don’t ask me how that works.

renegings: leggings you put on and then take off again immediately, quite possibly because they are preggings or dreggings.

ginger-meggings: based on the popular 1920s Australian comic strip ‘Ginger Meggs‘, these leggings are hand-knitted using the hair from small red-headed knockabout larrakins.

Anyway, to cut a long rant short, when I talked to my husband about these things, he told me he was TOTALLY going to buy me some jeggings and a mouse mat for my birthday this year. In fact, he was going to have the mouse mat personalised so that it was a photo of an actual mouse, using a computer mouse on a mouse mat, while wearing ginger-meggings made from my husband’s own red hair. And here’s the really neat thing: the mouse’s mouse mat will be personalised with a photo of that same mouse wearing ginger-meggings using a mouse on a personalised mouse mat. And so on.

All the world’s a bumper sticker. At least that’s how it feels at the moment.

Recently, my husband and I were driving and we came to one of those intersections where all three lanes of traffic had no choice but to turn left. I put on my indicator and couldn’t help but notice the other cars who weren’t indicating.

“I hate it when cars don’t indicate,” I said. “It’s like they assume I know that they are just going to follow the road rules and turn left. For all I know, they could be intending to go straight – illegally, mind you… Where’s their sense of community? Their pride of being part of a left-turning group, all indicating their left-turningness together?”

“Does it make you angry?” my husband asked.

“No, it saddens me,” I said. “It makes me feel… alone.”

“That’s very interesting,” he remarked. “I have often wondered what other people thought of my failure to indicate at intersections such as these.”

(By ‘often’, I think we can all assume my husband meant ‘I’m actually only thinking about this at this very moment since you happen to have raised it as a topic of conversation’. Still, I appreciated the fact he was feigning an interest.)

“Well, now you know,” I replied. “You make people like me sad.”

“And I expect you find it a bit of a turn off,” he observed.

“Yes. Yes, I do,” I mused although I should now stress that I wouldn’t necessarily be hot for someone simply because they DID indicate.

We then discussed a bumper sticker awareness program I could start. Some initial ideas included:

TURN ON (YOUR INDICATOR) AND TURN ON (ME).

TURN OFF YOUR TURN OFF AND TURN ON YOUR INDICATOR.

YOU TURN ME OFF WHEN YOU FAIL TO TURN ON: INDICATE.

or even

INDICATE, ARSE-CLOWN.

Interestingly enough, the other day when my youngest son took an unscheduled toilet break behind the park bench my husband and I were sitting on, my husband came up with his own bumper sticker awareness program for his MEP (Minimum Effort Parenting) style. The bumper sticker will apparently read:

IF YOU CAN’T SEE THEM, YOU’RE NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR THEM.

I argued that it probably should read “IF YOU CAN’T SEE THEM, YOU’RE PROBABLY NOT BEING RESPONSIBLE ENOUGH FOR THEM” but he thought that was too wordy.

This blog post started off with the title ‘An Open Letter To My Cold Sore’ but honestly, that fucker doesn’t deserve its own open letter.

It’s been the Worst House Guest Ever. It arrived unannounced, trashed my face (and my reputation as a Great Beauty – yeah, yeah, don’t laugh) and it then proceeded to overstay its welcome by, like, FOREVER.

For a while there, my only hope was that it would eventually grow so large it would become the size of a small African nation and proclaim its independence from me.

As it was, it quite possibly became the first human lesion visible from outer space. Most certainly, it arrived in a room a good thirty seconds before the rest of my body did. Small children would burst into tears when I – or rather ‘it’ – approached them. Some adults thought I was an extra from the film ‘Alien’ being attacked by a face-hugger. And I thoroughly expected Wes Craven to contact me in the hope my cold sore could be the New Face of Freddy Kruger.

I found myself having to warn friends in advance of meeting them.

“I have a cold sore,” I told them. “Do not talk about the cold sore, do not look at the cold sore and, most certainly, do not address the cold sore directly.”

I was worried that if they gave the cold sore too much attention, it would develop a human-like personality and end up with its own reality TV show by the end of the week. Like the Kardashians.

And every time it looked like it was on the mend, it would make a sudden comeback. Like Aussie Rocker Legend™ Johnny Farnham (although nowhere near as embarrassing).

And when it finally DID start to go away, it felt like the boyfriend that nobody ever liked but never told you they didn’t like him until after you’d broken up. Everyone who’d said things like ‘Oh, you can hardly see it!’ or “What cold sore?” at the height of my cold sore’s power, finally admitted, once it had slowly diminished into the west like some Elvin Queen on a boat, “Yeah, that was a big one” or “Man, that shit was like Cold Sore-zilla!”.

Listen, there is one good thing you can say about my cold sore and that is this: it made me come in from the cold and write this blog post. Even if it was kinda hard to see past the cold sore while I wrote it.